This polyphonic, hybrid collection encompasses one ecopoet's attempt to bird-dog his hunch it's more productive to think of man as a metaphor for magpie, not the other way around. Along the path to Sun Mountain, both the mystery and measure of magpiety screw in and out of focus, repeatedly, strangely, like some drunk old monk's vision, as he stands before a urinal, trying to read on the wall above him a daily gazette (gazza = Italian for magpie). Like Wallace Stevens's blackbird study, this collection revels in myriad ways of seeing magpie; its emotional and narrative arc loops like a zoomorphic Celtic knot through multiple sightings/citings/sitings of magpies voiced by diverse historical personages (an Anglo-Saxson scop, Arapaho storytellers, Gertrude Stein, Lewis and Clark).
Think, finally, of Dark Devouring as an (un)natural history of magpies meant to devour darkness-cast light where ignorance, superstition, suspicion of what's Other threatens our survival as a species. Not for the fainthearted, this book sees whole convocations of magpies slaughtered; it mouths hard truths, rages at our current predicament. Yet magpie's a bird word that survives as avian populations plummet, as languages go the way of the dodo. The bird dressed in black and white endures.